Jane Harris's List: Content Curation

• 1. Keep it relevant
• 2. Add your own two cents.
• 3. Only share content you found valuable.
• 4. Create a habit or ritual.
• 5. Images and videos
• Step 1: Create an email address that’s just for your subscriptions.
• Step 2: Set up Google Alerts for keywords in your niche.
• Step 3: Subscribe to the blogs and email newsletters of thought leaders in your field.
• Step 4: Seek out the best curators in your niche, and follow them.
• I recommend creating a Twitter list of the top curators, so you can easily check their updates and ignore the rest of the noise.
• Step 5: Use Tweetdeck to set up Twitter search streams for hashtags and keywords.

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• • Your blog or website is a source of the exact information they want on a regular basis.
   
  • It saves them from having to do their own sifting online.
   
  • Over time, they come to see you as a go-to source for their information.
   
  • They see you as a knowledgeable expert in your field.
• How can an automated program that uses keyword algorithms to suck up content from other sources create all of that? In truth, it can’t.

• include a snippet or quote so that your reader doesn’t have to go anywhere to get the gist of what the article says. Then they can make an informed decision as to whether they want to read further.
• I use the G-Whizz app to access Google Reader and share from there.

• Does such a curation system exist today? Yes, blogs, but blogs are HORRID for tracking this real time world
• Real-time curators need to add participation widgets.
• Real-time curators need to update their bundles.
• Real-time curators need to editorialize.
• Why can’t a curation tool be smart about distributing bundles and let you see and manipulate previews of how that bundle will distribute itself to the various places you need your bundles to go to get the right audience.
• Real-time curators need to distribute bundles.
• Why can’t we organize them all into sub bundles? All curated in order of importance?
• Real-time curators need to reorder things.
• we need bundling cross-platform so we can start pulling valuable atoms out of the real-time streams.
• Real-time curators need to bundle.
• Real-time curators need to track their audience.

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• The act of true content curation allows students to construct knowledge.
• Participatory learning leads to increased understanding.
• This necessitates that the curated items be organized, annotated, and published. This is an important part of the learning process that comes with the educational benefits of curating as compared to collecting.
• With curating, a larger goal is to benefit not only the collector, but other potential learners as well.
• Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important. So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard.
• Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important. So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard.
• How are they connected? What does the act of collecting add to understanding of the question at hand?
• to do justice to using the term “curating” for educational resources, inquiry must be a part of the process.
• Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important.
• With curating, a larger goal is to benefit not only the collector, but other potential learners as well. It is meant to be shared. And, both the process and the product of curating help the curator as well as those who view the curated collection to understand and to learn.
• My conclusion is that through publishing the curated resources, you add value to the collection as a whole by allowing others to share in that knowledge, comment on it, add to it, and participate in the learning that it generates.
• The act of true content curation allows students to construct knowledge. As teachers, we can build the scaffolding, present the problem or ask the essential question, design the learning scenario, give them the tools, and then turn over the learning to the students.

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• Content curation, on the other hand, is much like museum curation.
• These objects are carefully displayed, carefully picked over – less than half of what comes in to museums actually gets shown for public consumption.

• Don’t just create a to-do list; lay it out on daily and weekly schedules, breaking down key tasks of the project into chunks. Consider the level of concentration and focus that each type of task or chunk requires and schedule accordingly.
• A curator needs to have superb social media monitoring and listening skills. That means knowing the right keywords on the topic and sources, agility with “aggregator” tools and the daily discipline of foraging for the best content and evaluating your finds before sharing.
• One 21st century work place literacy is sense-making of information together and alone. Good curators can spot and highlight content related to their mission.
• Your content strategy is essential to the success of an integrated social media strategy.
• Reflection doesn’t have to take up a large amount of time to be effective. I take 10 minutes every morning to practice some visual recording skills like drawing to create my “3 Most Important Things for Today List.”

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• put the realm of the “social” at the center of what it means to share and build knowledge in our culture
• Yet, we have only begun to understand the ways that the “social life of information” and the social construction of knowledge can reshape the ways we create learning experiences in the formal college curriculum
• We believe though that the deepening role of social dimension in learning—which we take broadly to include all representational acts as constitutive of knowledge—is as yet very little understood, not only with respect to technology-enhanced classrooms but broadly across all learning contexts.
• With this in mind, we define social pedagogies as design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an “authentic audience” (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course.
• Social pedagogies build in iterative cycles of engagement with the most difficult material, and through a focus on authentic audience and representation of knowledge for others, help students deepen their understanding of core concepts by engaging in the ways of thinking, practicing, and communicating in a field.
• Our interest in the importance of focusing on the social dimensions of learning can be located at the intersection of three important discourses.
• social pedagogies are a way of understanding what is often referred to as authentic learning.
• Secondly,
• we have long hypothesized that social pedagogies are particularly effective at developing traits of  “adaptive expertise,” which include the ability of the learner to use knowledge flexibly and fluently, to evaluate, filter and distill knowledge for effect, to translate knowledge to new situations, and to understand the limits and assumptions of one’s knowledge.
• Equally as important is the cultivation of certain attitudes or dispositions characteristic of adaptive experts, including the ability to work with uncertainty, adapt to ambiguity or even failure, and to feel increasingly comfortable working at the edges of one’s competence.
• These kinds of adaptive traits
• are often invisible and elusive in the course design and assessment process.
• Designing a course that promotes, supports, and perhaps even evaluates these kinds of traits students implies that they have to be ways to make these effects visible—through some form of communication. And making them visible means, as well, means being conscious of them and increasingly reflective about them. This is one of the primary ways we see representation (and the social dimensions of learning) residing at the center of authentic learning (in both process and product).
• Representation of knowledge for others—whether as an author or maker, a teacher, a discussant or maker of arguments—implies that a learner has to step outside him or herself, to think about audience, context, and impact. Acts of representation are not merely vehicles to convey knowledge; they shape the very act of knowing.
• One of the salient research areas for higher education (and indeed other settings, such as organizational learning) is how to harness the effectiveness of informal learning in the formal curriculum.
• Critical to these strategies are what we call “intermediate cognitive processes,” or “intermediate intellectual moves,” which are intrinsic to adaptive expertise. This includes both faculty structures and guidance as well as formative feedback and reflection (including metacognitive reflection) that students make visible to themselves.
• Design:
• Scaffolding:
• By embodied learning, we mean that social pedagogies open up a set of filters or conditions for student learning–such as prior knowledge, identity, difference–that can be ignored or suppressed through more bounded, traditional pedagogies.
• Better understand how social pedagogies facilitate certain forms of metacognition and to identify a range of concrete strategies for building metacognitive reflection into authentic tasks and supportive processes

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